Friday, December 24. The week is coming to an end, so we can talk about the most interesting news in the crypto industry over the past day.
A record number of crypto mergers occurred in 2021
Cryptocurrency, financial and technology companies have set a record in 2021 for mergers and acquisitions totaling about $6.1 billion, according to a report from The Block Research.
According to the data received by analysts, to date, there are a total of more than 197 acquisitions. Last year, the companies concluded 85 such deals.
The revival of such activity is accompanied by the fact that in this way cryptocurrency companies eliminate competitors and expand their own services.
Take Bitcoin exchange Coinbase, for example, which acquired infrastructure solutions provider Bison Trails earlier this year. The amount of the deal is unknown. Cryptobank Galaxy Digital announced plans to buy financial services provider BitGo in the spring. The deal should be worth about $1.2 billion. The deal should take place at the end of the year.
Similar processes also occur in traditional financial companies. Mastercard announced the acquisition of analytical company CipherTrace.
First SMS sold as NFT
During the Aguttes auction, which was held in France, the first ever SMS message in the amount of 132 680 euros was sold as a non-fungible token.
Programmer Neil Papworth was the first in the world to send a text message containing congratulations to Merry Christmas to the head of Vodafone operator Richard Jarvis on December 3, 1992.
Who bought this NFT is unknown. The proceeds from the sale of the NFT will go to the UN Refugee Agency.
Toncoin developers received support from Pavel Durov
The founder of the Telegram messenger Pavel Durov supported the Toncoin developers on his twitter. After this post, the price of the token has increased by 46%.
Durov wrote that he is proud that “the technology we have created is alive and developing.” In addition, he emphasized that Toncoin does not depend on the Telegram team and wished the developers good luck.
In May 2020, Pavel Durov announced that the Telegram Open Network (TON) project was being closed due to litigation with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and a ban on the distribution of tokens.
After TON closed, some of the independent teams continued to work on the blockchain based on the project code.
Binance Will Start Burning BNB With New Algorithm
Binance crypto exchange decided to abandon the concept of quarterly burning of Binance Coin in favor of the Auto-Burn mechanism for automatic withdrawal from circulation.
During the quarterly burn, Binance pledged to withdraw 100 million tokens from circulation. During the last event, at the time of this writing, the company burned 1 335 888 BNB, and in total – more than 31 million BNB.
Auto-Burn will make this process more transparent. The algorithm does not take into account the revenues generated by the Binance platform, but solely based on the price of BNB and the number of blocks mined during the quarter.
The higher the BNB price, the fewer tokens the mechanism will withdraw from circulation. The program will be stopped when the total number of burned tokens reaches 100 million.